The Real Money in Books

Who Are The Book Collectors Buying?

As I mentioned last week, newsletters going forward will be behind the subscriber paywall for one week, and then they will be free to all. Here’s last week’s post.

My summer book proposal course starts July 7. Feel free to email me with questions if you are interested.

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Last week, Constance Grady of Vox ran a piece on Elon Musk’, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg’s love of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series. I knew of Banks vaguely: I read one of his early novels in college, but I knew nothing about this science fiction series, which published between 1987-2012. Banks, a leftist Scottish writer who died in 2013, is an unlikely hero of tech billionaires. My first thought, when I read the piece, was not to wonder about this weird fandom, or read the books themselves. No, it was much crasser: how can I make money off this?

As longtime readers of this newsletter know, I have been an amateur book flipper for decades. Nothing gives me a dopamine hit like finding an undervalued first edition in a Goodwill. Because I don’t care to keep books, nor would I keep them in good shape if I did, I eventually sell those finds online, and put the proceeds in an account I use for travel (once, after stocking up for awhile before flipping, I sold books on eBay and, with the proceeds, went to Dublin for a week with my son).

So off I went to my super-secret online places to hunt for first editions of Banks’ Culture series. Amazingly, I was too late. The best I could find was an American first printing hardback of the first book in the series for $120. Not enough room there for flipper profit (or else I’m not patient enough: if prices continue to rise I’ll regret not buying and holding).

The Culture series is in line with the other books that now seem to fly off the online thumbnails as soon as one is listed for below market price. Two notable of these are Dune and The Hobbit. I’ve watched Dune rise in value for years, ever since I found a book club edition in a thrift store about five years ago and was shocked to realize I could sell it for as much as $300 (I did sell it). The Hobbit is less sudden but has continued to rise, year over year. The other author who fits somewhat in this rubric is Cormac McCarthy, who is eagerly collected and whose prices keep rising.

What do these books have in common? Not hard to find. Commercial, genre—science fiction, fantasy, western—written by men. Why might these characteristics be collectible today? Perhaps partially because of who has money right now: people who work in tech, who are disproportionately male. (McCarthy is an asterix in this list, both of and not of it).

I have a terrible track record trying to predict future collectibles. When I first started doing this, I bought up American realists from the Gilded Age/Progressive era. I am here to tell you no one then or now is interested. After I read Galatea 2.2 when it came out, I started buying up Richard Powers first editions: same, more or less. Lately I’ve been buying 18th century American books, which it seems few want. The one prediction that has paid out was buying up Percival Everett first editions about four years ago: with Erasure, the true first, I made a 9000 % profit. (One might think my day job, acquiring new titles to publish, and my side hustle, predicting future collectibles, would use the same skill set. I hope this is not true!).

But what’s truly interesting about this hobby is thinking about why some books increase more in value than others. There are so many factors that go into this that it’s almost impossible to sync them all up, but here are some:

• Canonization by literary professionals, which leads to them being assigned in classrooms, which leads people to be nostalgic about those books when they are older and richer.
  

• Intense fandom that stems from outside any classroom or scholarship, which means there are many, many books in circulation (The Hobbit and Dune are in this class), raising the prices of—and scavenger hunt fun of finding— the first very copies ever sold. Movies and tv adaptations certainly help.
  

• Sometimes, the two converge, as with the case of Cormac McCarthy, probably the most highly valued recent author whose books are both prestigious and popular.
  

• Scarce copies of a book by a later famous author. First editions of books that were initially published in very small quantities and then went on to be famous are highly valuable. Ulysses is a classic example, but there are many other lesser-known ones that fit into this category. Often this will be the first novel by an author who started out obscure and later became known.
  

• Scarcity of a book that isn’t famous but is sought after. There are *so many* in this category. They are the hardest to learn about by their very nature. Yesterday, I listened to a podcast that talked about Olive Oatman, and a biography of her published in the 19th century. That biography became a bestseller, and went through numerous editions. Oatman hated the book, so when she later married, her wealthy husband bought up as many copies of the book as he could find and burned them. Therefore, a book that the country was awash in once is now very scarce. First editions go for as much as $7500. (Here I will raise yet another fascinating cultural issue surrounding book collecting: the ethics of wanting to pay handsomely for a book the subject abhorred).

Larger trends also point to how collecting reflects culture in interesting ways. Women continue to fetch lower prices than men. Toni Morrison first editions are affordable; Virginia Woolf isn’t astronomical; Stephen King is incredibly expensive; Ralph Ellison is not out of reach; Pynchon is more valuable than DeLillo; Mastering the Art of French Cooking early editions with Simone Beck’s name up top instead of Julia Child sell in an instant. Academics sometimes teach courses based on the bestsellers of the day, but it would incredible to teach one on the most highly collectible novels. I have an ever growing list of “the price of this book tells us something about ourselves right now” titles.

There’s another wrinkle in this game to consider: rare book dealers could influence the market and not just reflect it. If someone starts highlighting first editions of books that are not already highly collectible, and selling them a tad higher than the market, they might create more demand for those books. I think some try to do this; I don’t know how successful anyone has been. But literary value is something that humans create, and is arbitrary and mutable, so it could be done.

There is so much more I could write about this way of looking at books, publishing, the canon, and trends, but for now I’m going to give you some quick tips for checking your shelves if you want to assess value of old books.

• Here’s a good guide to identifying first editions.
  

• Most expensive sales of 2023 from AbeBooks
  

• I have found ViaLibri the best online site for assessing value and finding going prices. Do NOT look at the “highest price” at get excited. Scroll down, and down, and down.
  

• Condition is incredibly important to collectors. They want a book that looks like it just came out of the carton from the printers. (This frustrates me! I have 18th century books that have fascinating signs of use from former owners—signatures, or doodles, say—and I think they should increase value. Cookbooks especially! Consider this my first attempt to create such demand.)
  

• Signed editions increase the value significantly.
  

• Value fluctuates! The trendy author or first edition of 2010 is not the same in 2025. If you buy and hold, the price might go down. The more recently the book was published the more subject you may be to fluctuations in the market.
  

• People with lots of money tend to become the book collectors with the most money to spend. This takes us back to Iain M. Banks and the Culture series. Who do you think might buy this set for $6287.37?

So if you were to spend $100 on a few first editions of author who you think will be more collectible in the future, who would you bet on?